The amount of information on the Internet is vast and cluttered. One method of searching for information on the Internet is by making use of search engines. Search engines generate indices of web pages which are used when a search is requested. The search engine will generate rankings for the indexed pages. These rankings represent which search results the search engine determines are the most “relevant” to the client's request. This is usually done using various automated computer algorithms.
One of the downsides of automated computer algorithms is that unscrupulous users are able to find ways to circumvent the algorithms by discovering and exploiting the factors which these algorithms take into consideration when computing result rankings. For example, if a web page's rank is dependant on the number of hits it obtains, a user can write programs to continuously access the links to those sites, thus pushing up the page's ranking. This results in possible clustering of irrelevant results ranking very high amongst the search results.
In this mentioned article, the encryption process may also be a form of compression technique used to allow for data transmission and/or for the purpose of storage efficiency.